he omenswere against him. First came the sparrow, somehow
gaining entrance to the jail's waiting room. It flitted against the walls and
windows all afternoon, looking for a way out – a bad sign for Luetgert, one of
the guards said. A bird had flown into the jail a few years earlier, the guard
remembered, the day before a prisoner named
George Painter was found guilty
of murder. Was it just coincidence that a bird had come into this cage again,
the day before the Luetgert jury began deliberations?

John Whitman scoffed at the supposed omen. The jailer didn't
know about any bird foretelling Painter's guilt, and he doubted that this bird
had anything to do with Adolph Louis Luetgert. As far as he knew, the fluttering
of a sparrow in a jail signified nothing.

Even if Luetgert knew about the sparrow, it did not appear to
disturb him. He talked about what he would do after the jury set him free. He
would
exhibit himself in one of those dime museums, alongside the skeletons and
freaks, demanding a daily fee of $5,000. Once he had saved enough money to go back
into business, he would open a downtown saloon, with a sideshow of
curios from his trial, including the notorious "middle vat."

A second sign came with the dawn, when a screech owl pierced
the quiet outside the Cook County Jail. Some people on the street caught sight
of the bird beating its wings against the windows of the towering gray
courthouse. The owl fell to the ground and they captured it, taking it into a
saloon. The Chicago Journal called it the "Bird of Evil Omen."

A thousand men and women fought their way into the elevators
and up the three flights of stairs to Judge
Richard Tuthill's courtroom, hoping to hear
the trial's final words. Only a few hundred made it pastthe
blue-coated bailiffs. Some found places to sit on the long oaken benches, but
most were content to stand by the windows or on the railings. The crowd included
the usual quota of females, the ones the papers derisively labeled "morbid
women." Many of the same women who had been coming day after day vied for seats
behind the clerk's desk, where they would have the best view. When the trial began
in late August 1897, they had worn summer hats with brilliant flowers. Now it was
October and autumn's nodding plumes adorned their hats.

At the courtroom door the bailiff Edward Cool stopped a little
woman who wore an old straw hat over her gray locks. He inquired what business
she had in court.

"I am Mrs. Luetgert," she said.

Her statement caused a brief stir. Someone in the sheriff's
office dashed hatless down the stairs to catch a glimpse of the lady who claimed
to be Luetgert's missing wife, Louise. The mob struggled to get closer to her,
but it quickly became obvious that this was just another hoax.

Now the woman said she was a teacher. One of Judge Tuthill's
daughters was in her class, she said, and she had a letter from the judge
requesting the bailiffs to admit her. They looked at the letter and allowed her
into the court, which was noisy with the hum of voices.

The room hushed

when the judge came in and the prosecutor,
Charles Deneen, began to speak. Pale and tired, he addressed the jury at first
in low tones. The audiences had often been boisterous during the trial, but no
one even whispered now. The messenger boys ceased their vigorous gum chewing.
The spectators in the back rows strained to hear another variation of the story
they had been hearing for months: what had happened on May 1, 1897, the day
Luetgert's wife disappeared; what had happened that night in Luetgert's sausage
factory; and what the police had found inside the vat.

Luetgert appeared to be the least-concerned person in the
tense courtroom. He occasionally rocked his chair on its hind legs or closed his
eyes as if drifting off to sleep. Luetgert's face was florid and ruddy,
and his expression often seemed to show a man quite satisfied with
himself. He was five feet, ten inches tall, broad-shouldered and heavy. Writers
used the adjective thick to describe his hair, his hands, his neck and the fat
on his cheeks.

Deneen's voice gained strength as he went on. "Is the law so
weak that it cannot cope with skillful, fiendish, inhuman crimes?" he asked.
"Can the skill of a criminal cover up all traces of guilt? And the more fiendish
the guilt, the less chance the law has to cope with it? Not at all. She will not
reappear. You have her bones and her rings. You have her tooth and her hairpin.
You have her corset steels... She will not reappear. She is dead. He has treated
her so. He has treated her memory so."

A

s
Deneen spoke,a
couple of Chicago Journal reporters
were looking for a way to sneak some rope, boards, speaking-tube pipe and
pulleys into the courthouse's attic. The newspapermen, Fred A. Smith and W.H.
Stuart, decided that the only way to carry out their secret mission was to advance
straight through the multitude of spectators and sheriff's deputies in and
around the courthouse and hope for the best. They packed their gear into a
dry-goods box, covering it with coarse brown paper and nailing a board across
the top for a handle. They carried it up to the courthouse entrance, where the
deputies demanded to know its contents.

"Refreshments for the all-night newspaper crowd," one of the
reporters mumbled.

Satisfied, the officers waved them through. As the reporters
pushed into the horde, their box drew many curious glances. They made their way
through the halls and up the stairs, repeating their ruse to the guards on each
floor. They got as far as the fourth story, where the men and women stood so
close together that Smith and Stuart had to stop. They set down their heavy box
on a landing and rested a few moments, only to be startled by two deputy
sheriffs running down the stairs. "It's all off. They have had a tip," Stuart
whispered. But the deputies didn't betray the slightest suspicion about the box;
instead they offered to clear a path through the crowd.

At last the pair reached an empty corner of the sixth floor
and climbed an iron stairway up to the roof. From there they opened a set of
folding doors and lowered the box eight feet into the attic. Reentering the
building, they sent word to the Journal office that the apparatus was
ready.

I

n
the courtroomDeneen had
finished his speech. One of the few female journalists covering the trial, a Chicago Chronicle reporter
who wrote under the byline "Katharine," noticed how calm Luetgert seemed.
Sitting in the front row, she leaned over the railing and whispered to him, "I
am terribly nervous, ain't you?"

"No, not a bit," Luetgert said, laughing. "Here, give me your
hand." Katharine reached out her right hand to him, and he said, "Take courage.
That will give you some of mine. Don't you feel it?" Luetgert pointed to her
left hand and she gave him that one as well. "I am not nervous," he said. "You
should not be. I am brave."

It was about four o'clock when Judge Tuthill began reading his
instructions to the jury. As the shadows lengthened, the electric lights came
on. The judge had come to the trickiest part of the entire case: how to prove a
murder when no corpse has been found.

"To prove the corpus delicti in a case of murder," he
said, "does not require the state or prosecution to produce the body of the
alleged deceased, or any part thereof, or the testimony of any witness who has
seen the same since the commission of the alleged crime."

As the judge droned out the words on the verdict form – the
words the jurors were supposed to use if they found Luetgert guilty – the
defendant displayed his first visible reaction to the day's proceedings. A Chicago Record reporter wrote that he "winced like a wounded animal."

A sigh of relief swept over the courtroom. Judge Tuthill
looked around sharply at the noise and ordered the room cleared. Luetgert
tensed, his fingers flattening out on the arms of his chair. He cast his eyes
across the faces of the twelve men filing into the jury room. Their expressions
offered no hints regarding how they would vote, but the reporter Katharine, who clearly
hoped they would be merciful, thought their choice of attire indicated they were
unsympathetic toward Luetgert.

"How I wished that one of those jurymen had worn a scarlet
tie," she would write. "The strength of flaming red on one of those twelve men
would have helped me to have believed that one of them at least realized what a
perilous thing is life... But there was not a gay tie or cravat among those
twelve men. Nothing but black and white ones were worn, and I trembled for fear
the men who had donned dark-colored ones valued life as little as did Charles
Deneen, who pled long and seriously for a brother's life."

The crowd moved out slowly, for the curious hoped to catch one
more glance of the sausage maker. Young women gathered around Luetgert and tried
to draw him into conversation, but he did not waste much time with them. The bailiff
Isaac Reed told Luetgert he would have to go back to the jail, and the pack of
court watchers opened a path for the prisoner. Luetgert saw his youngest son
come through the crowd, arms outstretched. Luetgert bent forward, murmuring,
"Elmer, Elmer," as the five-year-old clasped his hands around his father's neck.
Elmer's lips brushed against Luetgert's mustache in a kiss.

"My boy, my boy," Luetgert said, as Reed touched his sleeve.
"Yes, in a minute, in a minute," Luetgert told the bailiff. "I must see my son."

"Is it all over, Papa?" the boy asked.

"Not yet, baby, but it will be so today." Luetgert handed the
boy back to Mary Charles, a family friend who had been holding the boy during
court that day. Luetgert marched over to the jail with tears in his eyes.

B

y
nowthe Journal had dispatched nine reporters to
the courthouse. Stuart and William Etten were the decoys. As the newspaper would
later report, the two "were stationed in the courtroom to leave the impression
that the Journal was using the same old-fashioned, plodding means of
obtaining news as the representatives of other Chicago dailies." Meanwhile,
three Journal reporters went to various parts of the courthouse to act as
lookouts. Smith took three colleagues – Charles Mitchell, Edwin F. Payne and
Cornelious Rourke – to the attic.

The four men lit their lanterns and unpacked the rope and
pulleys that had been deposited into the attic earlier. They entered a tunnel
that was four feet wide and barely as high. As soon as they pressed down on the
tunnel's sheet-iron floor, the metal gave out a loud groan. Fearing the noise
would be heard throughout the building, the men set down some boards along the
tunnel's lining, which quieted the creaks.

After crawling fifteen feet they came to the building's west
air shaft, a sheer drop of 150 feet. The shaft was walled with smooth, solid
stone, but it was not completely black. Beams of light shone into the darkness
from vents in the eight jury rooms – including the chamber on the third floor
that the Luetgert jury would soon be entering.

The four men crouched at the shaft's edge, where they had
planned to set up a pulley. Three of them would use the rope to lower the other
man down the shaft. But a large water pipe near the edge didn't give them enough
space to set up the pulley, so instead they looped the rope twice around the
pipe. One end of the rope was fastened to a strong plank seat. They slipped the
seat over the tunnel's sheet-iron edge.

The reporters hesitated. Since they had nothing to use as a brace, they could be pulled into the shaft by a sudden jerk of the rope.
The sharp metal edge might cut the rope before the man in the shaft had
descended even five feet, dropping him far down to the basement – and almost
certainly to his death. The Journal reporters would later claim they
gained some courage when they looked out through narrow chinks in the attic wall
and caught a glimpse of rival newspapermen on the roof of an adjoining building,
vying for the best vantage points to peer into the jury room with their
spyglasses. And a sound drifted up into the attic from four stories below:
reporters for the other papers were rushing about and discussing the case.
The Journal men decided to go on with their mission.

They laid some strong burlap across the edge of the shaft,
hoping it would prevent the rope from fraying. They lowered the sixty feet of
speaking tube down the shaft. They chose Smith, the lightest man, to make the
descent. They tied one end of a string to a nail in the metal floor, and Smith
put the ball of string in his pocket. He got onto the plank seat, clinging to
the rope until he was a few feet below the tunnel. He ordered the others to pay
out the rope. As the rope made its first turn around the pipe, a wailing sound
echoed through the building's dark corners. Mitchell, Payne and Rourke paused to
moisten the pipe with oil from one of their lanterns. That reduced the din as
they continued lowering Smith.

He swung back and forth in the six-by-four-foot airshaft,
using his knees as cushions to keep the wooden seat from striking the walls.
He had thought of this in advance and worn an extra pair of trousers for padding.
As he neared the third floor, he heard a confused noise below him, sounding
unmistakably like the Luetgert jurors retiring to their room. Smith yanked on
the twine – the signal to stop – and the creaking rope became silent. After a
momentary lull in the jury room, the voices became louder, and Smith decided it
was safe to go down a bit farther. He tugged twice on the twine. The rope
lowered him to the third floor. Brushing cobwebs from his face with one hand and
holding the rope with the other, Smith came to rest within two feet of the
Luetgert jury.

As the sound of the jurors, arguing over bones and rings, came
through the register, Smith repeated their words, whispering into a funnel on
the end of the speaking tube. One of the reporters in the attic listened to the
earpiece on the other end of the tube and jotted down the jurors' words.

It soon became clear the jurors weren't going to have an easy
time reaching a decision. At times it sounded as if they might break out into a
brawl. After a while Smith heard one of the jurors suggest a compromise: find
Luetgert guilty but sentence him to prison rather than death. "If Mrs. Luetgert
should turn up," he said, "we would feel pretty badly after giving this man the
extreme penalty."

Several jurors protested. "This man is either innocent or
guilty," said a juror Smith recognized as William Harlev. "If guilty, he is a
monster, and there is not a scaffold in the country high enough for him. If
innocent, he should go free."

Smith whispered it all into the tube. A cold draft
blew on him steadily, and as the hours wore on, his arms and legs grew
numb.

O

utside
two thousand people had gathered, waiting for news. Entire
families lingered in the street, some of the women holding infants. Businessmen
in high hats and patent-leathers stood among dusty, grimy laborers, unattended
women, chattering urchins and bicyclers trundling their wheels.

Lacking any news, the spectators talked about the trial and
guessed what the jurors would decide. The crowd quickly surrounded and
questioned anyone coming out of the courthouse, and the police repeatedly
ordered the sidewalks cleared. It had been one of the hottest autumns in the
history of Chicago, but tonight was cold, and the chill wind sent shivering
women into the shelter of window embrasures and doorways. Men lacking overcoats
ducked into nearby saloons.

The people watched the lighted windows on the third and fourth
stories of the courthouse, searching for signs of action in the prosecutor's
office or the courtroom. Others looked toward the jail, gazing up at the window
of Luetgert's cell. They could see the barred door and occasionally thought
they had caught a glimpse of the prisoner.

A rumor that the jury had sent for
blankets crept through
the crowd. Hundreds of tired people took this as their signal to set out for
home, but scores remained, sitting on the curbs. Some of them walked around the
block, returning from time to time to inquire for news. Hotel waiting rooms,
saloons and cigar and drug stores were thronged for two blocks around the jail.
At midnight a hundred men and a dozen women were still on the sidewalks.

"Through all the long, chilly hours of waiting no loud talking
or any kind of disturbance occurred," the Chicago Daily Tribune noted.
"It was simply an eagerly curious crowd watching for the curtain to descend on
the most remarkable murder case of this generation."